Early Spring in Massachusetts (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By Henry David Thoreau

One of America’s most celebrated naturalists, Thoreau often chose nature over human companionship for comfort. Early Spring in Massachusetts is one of four seasonal volumes culled from his journals and captures the season with Thoreau’s keen eye and appreciation for his surroundings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Apr 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411449060

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American author and naturalist. A leading figure of Transcendentalism, he is best remembered for Walden, an account of the two years he spent living in a cabin on the north shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, and for Civil Disobedience, an essay that greatly influenced the abolitionist movement and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

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EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-4906-0

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY

EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS

INTRODUCTORY

HENRY DAVID THOREAU was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and died there May 6, 1862. Most of his life was spent in that town, and most of the localities referred to in this volume are to be found there. His Journal, from which the following selections were made, was bequeathed to me by his sister Sophia, who died October 7, 1876, at Bangor, Maine. Before it came into my possession I had been in the habit of borrowing volumes of it from time to time, and thus continuing an intercourse with its author which I had enjoyed, through occasional visits and correspondence, for many years before his death, and which I regard as perhaps the highest privilege of my life.

In reading the Journal for my own satisfaction, I had sometimes been wont to attend each day to what had been written on the same day of the month in some other year; desiring thus to be led to notice, in my walks, the phenomena which Thoreau noticed, so to be brought nearer to the writer by observing the same sights, sounds, etc., and if possible have my love of nature quickened by him. This habit suggested the arrangement of dates in the following pages, viz., the bringing together of passages under the same day of the month in different years. In this way I hoped to make an interesting picture of the progress of the seasons, of Thoreau's year. It was evidently painted with a most genuine love, and often apparently in the open air, in the very presence of the phenomena described, so that the written page brings the mind of the reader, as writing seldom does, into closest contact with nature, making him see its sights, hear its sounds, and feel its very breath upon his cheek.

Thoreau seems deliberately to have chosen nature rather than man for his companion, though he knew well the higher value of man, as appears from such passages as the following: The blue sky is a distant reflection of the azure serenity that looks out from under a human brow. To attain to a true relation to one human creature is enough to make a year memorable. And somewhere he says in substance, What is the singing of birds or any natural sound compared with the voice of one we love? Friendship was one of his favorite themes, and no one has written with a finer appreciation of it. Still, in ordinary society, he found it so difficult to reach essential humanity through the civilized and conventional, that he turned to nature, who was ever ready to meet his highest mood. From the haunts of business and the common intercourse of men he went into the woods and fields as from a solitary desert into society. He might have said with another,—he did virtually say,— If we go solitary to streams and mountains, it is to meet man there where he is more than ever man.

But while I have sought in these selections to represent the progressive life of nature, I have also been careful to give Thoreau's thoughts, because though his personality is in a striking degree single, he being ever the same man in his conversation, letters, books, and the details of his life, though his observation is imbedded in his philosophy (how to observe is how to behave, etc.), yet if any distinction may be made, his thoughts or philosophy seem to me incomparably the more interesting and important. He declined from the first to live for the common prizes of society, for wealth or even what is called a competence, for professional, social, political, or even literary success; and this not from a want of ambition or a purpose, but from an ambition far higher than the ordinary, which fully possessed him,—an ambition to obey his purest instincts, to follow implicitly the finest intimations of his genius, to secure thus the fullest and freest life of which he was capable. He chose to lay emphasis on his relations to nature and the universe rather than on those he bore to the ant-hill of society, not to be merely another wheel in the social machine. He felt that the present is only one among the possible forms of civilization, and so preferred not to commit himself to it. Herein lies the secret of that love of the wild which was so prominent a trait in his character.

It is evident that the main object of society now is to provide for our material wants, and still more and more luxuriously for them, while the higher wants of our nature are made secondary, put off for some Sunday service and future leisure. A great lesson of Thoreau's life is that all this must be reversed, that whatever relates to the supply of inferior wants must be simplified, in order that the higher life may be enriched, though he desired no servile imitation of his own methods, for perhaps the highest lesson of all to be learnt from him is that the only way of salvation lies in the strictest fidelity to one's own genius.

A late English reviewer, who shows in many respects a very just appreciation of Thoreau, charges him with doing little beyond writing a few books, as if that might not be a great thing; but a life so steadily directed from the first toward the highest ends, gaining as the fruits of its fidelity such a harvest of sanity, strength, and tranquillity, and that wealth of thought which has been well called the only conceivable prosperity, accompanied, too, as it naturally was, with the earnest and effective desire to communicate itself to others,—such a life is the worthiest deed a man can perform, the purest benefit he can confer upon his fellows, compared with which all special acts of service or philanthropy are trivial.

H. G. O. BLAKE.

EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS

February 24, 1852. P. M. Railroad causeway. I am reminded of spring by the quality of the air. The cock-crowing, and even the telegraph harp prophesy it, though the ground is, for the most part, covered with snow. It is a natural resurrection, an experience of immortality. . . . . The telegraph harp reminds me of Anacreon. That is the glory of Greece, that we are reminded of her only when in our best estate,—our elysian days,—when our senses are young and healthy again. I could find a name for every strain or intonation of the harp from one or other of the Grecian bards. I often hear Mimnermus; often, Menander. I am too late by a day or two for the sand foliage on the east side of the Deep Cut. It is glorious to see the soil again here where a shovel perchance will enter it and find no frost. The frost is partly come out of this bank, and it has become dry again in the sun. The very sound of mens work reminds, advertises, me of the coming of spring, as I now hear the laborer's sledge on the rails. . . . . As we grow older, is it not ominous that we have more to write about evening, less about morning. We must associate more with the early hours.

February 24, 1854. P. M. To Walden and Fair Haven. Nuthatches are faintly answering each other, tit for tat, on different keys—a faint creak. Now and then one utters a loud, distinct quah. This bird, more than any other I know, loves to stand with its head downward; meanwhile, chickadees, with their silver tinkling are flitting high above through the tops of the pines. . . . . Observed in one of the little pond holes between Walden and Fair Haven, where a partridge had traveled around in the snow, amid the bordering bushes, twenty-five rods; had pecked the green leaves of the lambkill, and left fragments on the snow, and had paused at each high blueberry bush, and shaken down fragments of its bark on the snow. The buds appeared to be its main object. I finally scared the bird.

February 24, 1855. The brightening of the willow or of osiers, that is a season in the spring, showing that the dormant sap is awakened. I now remember a few osiers which I have seen early in past springs, thus brilliantly green or red, and it is as if all the landscape shone. Though the twigs were few that I saw, I remember it as a prominent phenomenon affecting the face of nature, a gladdening of her face. You will often fancy that they look brighter before the spring has come, and when there has been no change in them. Thermometer at 10° at 10 P. M.

February 24, 1857. A fine spring morning. The ground is almost completely bare again. There has been a frost in the night. Now at half past eight it is melted and wets my feet like a dew. The water on the meadow this still bright morning is smooth as in April. I am surprised to hear the strain of a song-sparrow from the river side, and as I cross from the causeway to the hill, thinking of the bluebird, I that instant hear one's note from deep in the softened air. It is already 40°. By noon it is between 50° and 60°. As the day advances I hear more bluebirds, and see their azure flakes settling on the fence posts. Their short rich warble curls through the air. Its grain now lies parallel to the bluebird's warble, like boards of the same lot. It seems to be one of those early springs of which we have heard, but which we have never experienced.

I have seen the probings of skunks for a week or more. I now see where one has pawed out the worn dust or chankings from a hole in the base of a walnut, and torn open the fungi, etc., exploring for grubs or insects They are very busy these nights.

If I should make the least concession my friend would spurn me. I am obeying his law as well as my own.

Where is the actual friend you love? Ask from what hill the rainbow's arch springs! It adorns and crowns the earth. Our friends are our kindred, of our species. There are but few of our species on the globe. Between me and my friend what unfathomable distance! All mankind, like water and insects, are between us. If my friend says in his mind, I will never see you again, I translate it, of necessity, into ever. That is its definition in Love's lexicon. Those we can love we can hate. To others we are indifferent.

P. M. To Walden. The railroad in the Deep Cut is dry as in spring, almost dusty. The best of the sand foliage is already gone. I walk without a great coat. A chickadee, with its winter lisp, flits over. I think it is time to hear its phebe note, and that instant it pipes it forth. Walden is still covered with thick ice, though melted a foot from the shore. The French (in the Jesuit Relation) say fil de l'eau for that part of the current of a river in which any floating thing would be carried, generally about equidistant from the two banks. It is a convenient expression for which I think we have no equivalent.

February 24, 1858. I see rhodora in bloom in a pitcher with water andromeda. Went through that long swamp northeast of Boaz's Meadow. Interesting and peculiar are the clumps and masses of panicled andromeda, with light brown stems, topped uniformly with very distinct, yellow-brown recent shoots, ten or twelve inches long, with minute red buds sleeping close along them. This uniformity in such masses gives a pleasing tinge to the swamp's surface. Wholesome colors which wear well. I see quite a number of emperor moths' cocoons attached to this shrub, some hung round with a loose mass of leaves as big as my two fists. What art in the red-eye to make these two adjacent maple twigs serve for the rim of its pensile basket, inweaving them! Surely it finds a place for itself in nature, between the two twigs of a maple. On the side of the meadow moraine, just north of the bowlder field, I see barberry bushes three inches in diameter and ten feet high. What a surprising color this wood has. It splits and splinters very much when I bend it. I cut a cane, and, shaving off the outer bark, find it of imperial yellow, as if painted,—fit for a Chinese mandarin.

February 25, 1859. Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse. I heard this morning a nuthatch in the elms on the street. I think they are heard oftener at the approach of spring, just as the phebe note of the chickadee is, and so their quah quah is a herald of the spring.

A good book is not made in the cheap and off-hand manner of many of our scientific reports, ushered in by the message of the President communicating it to Congress, and the order of Congress that many thousand copies be printed with the letters of instruction from the Secretary of the Interior (or rather exterior); the bulk of the book being a journal of a picnic or sporting expedition by a brevet lieutenant-colonel, illustrated by photographs of the traveler's footsteps across the plains, and an admirable engraving of his native village as it appeared on his leaving it, and followed by an appendix on the paleontology of the route by a distinguished savant who was not there; the last illustrated by very finely executed engravings of some old broken shells picked up on the road.

There are several men of whose comings and goings the town knows little,—I mean the trappers. They may be seen coming from the woods and river, perhaps with nothing in their hands, and you do not suspect what they have been about. They go about their business in a stealthy manner for fear that any should see where they set their traps, for the fur-trade still flourishes here. Every year they visit the out-of-the-way swamps and meadows and brooks to set and examine their traps for musquash and mink, and the owners of the land commonly know nothing of it. But few as the trappers are here, it seems by G——'s accounts that they steal one another's traps.

All the criticism I got on my lecture on Autumnal Tints, at Worcester, on the 22d, was that I presumed my audience had not seen so much of them as they had. But after reading it I am more than ever convinced that they have not seen much of them, that there are very few persons who do see much of nature.

February 25, 1860. The fields of open water amid the thin ice of the meadows are the spectacle today. They are especially dark blue when I look southwest. Has it anything to do with the direction of the wind? It is pleasant to see high, dark blue waves half a mile off, running incessantly along the edge of white ice. There the motion of the blue liquid is the most distinct. As the waves rise and fall they seem to run swiftly along the edge of the ice.

For a day or two past I have seen in various places the small tracks of skunks. They appear to come out commonly in the warmer weather in the latter part of February.

I noticed yesterday the first conspicuous silvery sheen from the needles of the white pine waving in the wind. A small one was conspicuous by the side of the road, more than a quarter of a mile ahead. I suspect that those plumes which have been oppressed or contracted by snow and ice, are not only dried, but opened and spread by the wind. Those peculiar tracks which I saw some time ago, and still see, made in slosh, and since frozen at the andromeda ponds, I think must be mole tracks, and those nicks on the sides are where they shoved back the snow with their vertical flippers. This is a very peculiar track, a broad channel in slosh and at length in ice.

February 26, 1840. The most important events make no stir on their first taking place, nor indeed in their effects directly. They seem hedged about by secrecy. It is concussion on the rushing together of air to fill a vacuum which makes a noise. The great events to which all things consent, and for which they have prepared the way, produce no explosion, for they are gradual, and create no vacuum which requires to be filled. As a birth takes place in silence, and is whispered about the neighborhood, but an assassination, which, is at war with the constitution of things, creates a tumult immediately.

February 26, 1841. My prickles or smoothness are as much a quality of your hand as of myself. I cannot tell you what I am more than a ray of the summer's sun. What I am, I am, and say not. Being is the great explainer. In the attempt to explain, shall I plane away all the spines till it is no thistle, but a cornstalk. If my world is not sufficient without thee, my friend, I will wait till it is, and then call thee. You shall come to a palace, not to an alms-house. To be great we do as if we would be tall merely, longer than we are broad, stretch ourselves and stand on tiptoe. But greatness is well-proportioned, unstrained, and stands on the soles of the feet.

In composition I miss the hue of the mind, as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning and evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. This good book helps the sun shine in my chamber. The rays fall on its page as if to explain and illustrate it. I, who have been sick, hear cattle low in the street with such a healthy ear as prophesies my cure. These sounds lay a finger on my pulse to some purpose. A fragrance comes in at all my senses which proclaims that I am still of nature, the child. The threshing in yonder barn, and the tinkling of the anvil come from the same side of Styx with me. If I were a physician I would try my patients thus: I would wheel them to a window and let nature feel their pulses. It will soon appear if their sensuous existence is sound. These sounds are but the throbbing of some pulse in me. Nature seems to have given me these hours to pry into her private drawers. I watch the insensible perspiration rising from my coat or hand on the wall. I go and feel my pulse in all the recesses of the house, and see if I am of force to carry a homely life and comfort into them.

February 26, 1852. We are told today that civilization is making rapid progress; the tendency is ever upward, substantial justice is done even by human courts. You may trust the good intentions of mankind. We read tomorrow in the newspapers that France is on the eve of going to war with England to give employment to her army. This Russian war is popular. What is the influence of men of principle? or how numerous are they? How many moral teachers has society? Of course so many as she has will resist her. How many resist her? How many have I heard speak with warning voice? The preacher's standard of morality is no higher than that of his audience. He studies to conciliate his hearers, and never to offend them. Does the threatened war between France and England evince any more enlightenment than a war between two savage tribes, the Iroquois and Hurons? Is it founded in better reason?

February 26, 1855. Directly off Clam-shell Hill, within four rods of it, where the water is three or four feet deep, I see where the musquash dived and brought up clams before the last freezing. Their open shells are strewn along close to the edge of the ice, and close together for about three rods in one place, and the bottom under the edge of the older ice, as seen through the new black ice, is perfectly white with those which sank. They may have been blown in or the ice may have melted. The nacre of these freshly opened shells is very fair, azure, or else a delicate salmon pink (?), or rosaceous, or violet. I find one not opened, but frozen, and several have one valve quite broken in two in the rat's effort to wrench them open, leaving the frozen fish half-exposed. All the rest show the marks of their teeth at one end or the other. You can see distinctly also the marks of their teeth where with a scraping cut they have scraped off the tough muscle which fastens the fish to its shell, also sometimes all along the nacre next the edge. . . . . These shells lie thickly around the edge of each small circle of thinner black ice in the midst of the white, showing where was open water a day or two ago. At the beginning and end of winter, when the river is partly open, the ice thus serves the muskrat instead of other stool. . . . . Hence it appears that this is still a good place for clams as it was in Indian days.

February 26, 1857. What an accursed land, methinks unfit for the habitation of man, where the wild animals are monkeys!

February 27, 1841. Life looks as fair at this moment as a summer's sea . . . . like a Persian city or hanging gardens in the distance, so washed in light, so untried, only to be thridded by clean thoughts. All its flags are flowing and tassels streaming, and drapery flapping like some pavilion. The heavens hang over it like some low screen, and seem to undulate in the breeze.